Mohammed Ashi’s couture-only label has dressed Zendaya, Teyana Taylor, Margot Robbie and Kylie Jenner in the past year. Here’s how it happened.
Zendaya’s latest stop on the Spider-Man: Brand New Day press run came with a dress that looked engineered rather than sewn. Liquid black silk, an architectural high-low skirt, and two straps that rose past her ears like antennae. The look came straight off Ashi Studio’s Fall 2026 couture runway, and it wasn’t her first time wearing the house. She turned up in it at a fan event in Mexico City and again at the Los Angeles premiere of Euphoria.
She also isn’t the only one. Ashi Studio has been picking off big red-carpet moments for a while now without ever really entering the mainstream fashion conversation.
Givenchy, Elie Saab, then Paris
Mohammed Ashi founded the label in 2007, after working for Givenchy and Elie Saab. In 2023 he became the first Saudi Arabian admitted to the Fédération de la Haute Couture in Paris as a guest member, and he has shown on the couture calendar ever since.
That leaves him in an odd spot. Very few houses now do couture and nothing else. Chanel, Dior and Schiaparelli all have ready-to-wear and accessories behind them, plus decades of history people already know. A label like Ashi Studio, or Standing Ground, has almost no route into the mass-market conversation. Dressing famous people is the route.
The clothes help. Ashi builds with corsetry, distorts the proportions of the body, and hangs pieces off his gowns that look like they should fall over but don’t. The materials are strange in a good way: 3D-printed metal in one look, something resembling cracked plaster in another.
A collection built out of famous parties
The Fall 2026 collection took its cue from history’s most extravagant social events. The 1972 Rothschild Surrealist Ball, thrown by Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and Baron Guy de Rothschild, was one reference. So was the “Ball of the Century”, hosted by Carlos de Beistegui at the Palazzo Labia in Venice in 1951.
Beyond the inky black dress Zendaya wore, there was a slinky gown with quietly padded hips and shoulders, finished to look like reptile skin, and a moiré minidress with fringed edges and carafes folded into the skirt.
Teyana Taylor is the loudest believer
Taylor has never met a difficult dress she didn’t like, and she has now worn Ashi three separate times from the Spring 2026 couture collection.
At the 2026 Billboard Women in Music Awards she wore a sculpted cream corset trimmed with flourishes of human hair by the artist Guilaine Tortereau, over an ombré, tattered sheer skirt. In February, at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, she wore a piece made of iridescent white fabric sheer enough to show the boning underneath. At the 2026 NAACP Image Awards, she appeared in black silk with a sculpted bodice and a draped skirt.
Margot Robbie and stylist Andrew Mukamal also came back to the house repeatedly during the Wuthering Heights press tour over the winter. For the Sydney premiere, Robbie wore another of Ashi’s textured corsets, this one with a tattered silk skirt and sleeves.
In the past year alone the label has also dressed Hailey Bieber, Jenna Ortega, Kylie Jenner, FKA Twigs, Emily Blunt and Anok Yai.
Fantasy is winning right now
Plenty of designers are pulling in the opposite direction. Mathieu Blazy at Chanel has been trying to make couture feel wearable and real. Ashi has gone the other way entirely, which happens to suit a red carpet that rewards whoever makes the biggest noise. It explains why Matieres Fecales, Dilara Findikoglu and Robert Wun are all doing well in the same space. None of them has much interest in restraint either.
There’s something a bit depressing about watching actors compete for attention at what are, in the end, promotional events. But if the reward system is going to exist, better that it favours risk and actual craft than another safe column dress. Ashi keeps pairing the eye-catching trick with real construction, which is more than most.
